


All I Have To Say

by Thurisaz



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Anti-Gay Slurs, Homophobic Language, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Vietnam War AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2015-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1737089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thurisaz/pseuds/Thurisaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hank cannot remember the exact moment when Alex checked out, left, was gone, went flying, and started edging to enlist. “It’s crowded here,” he kept saying. “I need the space, god, I just—Something's in me, you know?”</p><p>There was only Charles, Sean, Hank, and Alex in the house at the time. Hank didn’t know, not really.</p><p>"Don’t give me that look. Perk up, sweetcheeks," Alex kept saying. "I can read you like a fucking book. Bozo."</p><p>Sean leaves after a while. Alex gets his draft card in the mail. He kisses Hank on the forehead before he sneaks out one night after Charles has gone to sleep. “Trust me on this,” he says.</p><p>(Taken from prequel work on Tumblr: "The Outer Valence")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. #1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is mainly posted on my Alex Summers fic blog: pfcsummers.tumblr.com/ Updates will always come earlier on the blog than on AO3. Please like, follow, and reblog!
> 
> Tags will be added as chapters are published, and please watch the rating because it is open for change.

1962\. Westchester, New York.

A few days after Cuba Hank decided to try and fix the Blackbird. He gleaned the blueprints from Lockheed, although he never admitted to it, because giving a Valkyrie that much body modification didn’t cut it. It was demolished, now, incinerated and melted into the bay, covered by palm trees that burned for a week solid from all the jet fuel.

During the long quiet nights, after Charles locked himself into his study and Alex left, off doing hell-knows-what upstairs with Sean, Hank plotted out the blueprints. He readjusted for size, figured if he could make the entire body bullet proof, weighed the pros and cons of Mach-3 supersonic flight while carrying a passenger payload of seven or eight. There were only four of them but he hoped, more often than not, and probably foolishly, that Charles would come out of this fugue and find more students.

The house was empty and cold as the days passed out of autumn. His hearing, now more sensitive to the rustle of clothes and the shrill waver of Sean’s voice, as well as Alex’s swaying gate as he haunted the corridors after hours, was keen to the absence of Raven, Erik, and Angel. Sometimes he thought he heard echos of them laughing while he was down working in the hangar. His fur would prickle along his neck and arms as if waiting for one of them to come up from behind and drag him up, complain to him, “Come on Hank, let’s go," but they never came, and he felt a flush of embarrassment, even if his skin no longer had the pigment to show it.

Alex didn’t talk to him much anymore, not that it was anything unexpected. Like before, Alex was standoffish, aggressive and brutal in how he spoke and how he carried himself. He needed space. Otherwise he would lash out: trial and error evident in the number of contusions that Hank’s blue fur hid away on his legs, his upper arms, sometimes on his back. Alex never hit him, he simply pushed Hank away.

But his absence was overwhelming to Hank’s senses. The bunker no longer smelled like ash and sweat and burning cotton mannequins; the first downstairs sitting room was void of the tang of Alex’s leather jacket and the aerosol of his deodorant.

Sean’s scent was everywhere he expected it to be: the upstairs, the kitchen, the third floor bathroom where he hotboxed, thinking Charles wouldn’t somehow notice. Sean was young, a staple and predictable. Most times Hank could phase out his jabber or his high slurs. Most times Hank could find Sean and Alex together, playing pool or smoking cigarettes by the front pond.

Not so much, these past few days. It was late, now, and the hangar’s lights were starting to hurt his eyes from their blanching brightness. He rolled up the blueprints and locked them in his black box trunk. His fur caught on the hinge and stuck there.

:::

In the morning he helped Charles out of bed and into the bathroom to start the day. Sean looked scared when they all realized, the first day back from the beach and when they were still stinging from the sun and heat and the abandonment of Raven and Erik, that Charles would need help. Before he had been an athlete, at least a passable one; someone whose mind encased his entire body and had its own kinetic movement when he spoke to their collective subconsciousness.

Hank assumed responsibility, because he figured neither Alex nor Sean ever had something to be responsible about.

Alex was finishing a pot of coffee when Hank and Charles made it to the kitchen. The room smelled burned and sour from over-roasted grounds, but Charles paid no mind. “Good morning, Alex,” he said. Hank started a cup of breakfast tea.

Alex grunted. “S’pose.” The sun had only begun to rise, and the dark teak wood of the kitchen looked uninviting and cold.

"Hank tells me that he has some new plans for an amplifier for you."

"Well isn’t that just fucking dandy. Gonna try and get something right for once, Bigfoot?”

"Something like that," Hank said.

For a moment they stared at each other. Alex’s face, despite its youth, had the same uncanniness for foulness, just like Erik. When he was angry he looked violent, and even Hank’s inner Beast cringed at the assertion in his brow and shoulders.

Alex finished his coffee and gave Charles a wide berth when he sulked out of the kitchen. He checked Hank into the cabinets with enough force to rattle the silverware in the drawer at Hank’s hip.

"I’m sure he’s just tired," Charles said. "We all are. It’s been a long while since we’ve had a good start."

Hank set the tea in front of Charles. “He’s right though,” he said. “Realistically speaking. I’ve really done nothing but give a series of statistical errors that ended up with—this.” His feet flexed against the tile of the floor. “It was stupid.”

"I think it’s rather ingenious, actually." Charles sipped his tea, closing his eyes for a moment before he cleared his throat. "And a little bit poetic. Hiding was never going to be possible, Hank. Secrecy, yes. But complete removal? It was only delaying the inevitable." This is you, Charles says in his head. You’ve just been too wary of it to get to know yourself.

"Dramatic irony, maybe."

A window shattered somewhere upstairs, and Hank and Charles could hear Alex’s hoarse laughter and Sean’s childish giggling.

:::

The plane wasn’t much more than a smattering of metallic guts poorly organized about the hangar. The engines, new J58s that stood three times Hank’s size, would be hard to come by, but the rest of the bones were there and waiting to be assembled into some hybrid jet.

Sometimes Alex came into the hangar, bustling and moving pieces of sheet metal or instruments for the cockpit.

"I always figured you’d be a fiddler. I bet you take apart the toaster and put it back together when you’re bored."

"More like I try to fix your amplifier so you can shoot straight." Hanks fur was covered in oil and tacky heatproof sealant. He tried to rub it off, then to groom himself. His mouth tasted sour, maybe from embarrassment, maybe from the tar. "Forgive me for trying to put your well-being before that of the jet."

Alex ran his fingers over a workbench that was covered in socket wrenches, a soldering gun, and rolls of copper wire.

"No quips?"

"Nah, man. Sorry to disappoint."

For the first time since they met, Alex seemed to lose his aggression, his spark. He stood awkwardly in the hangar, shifting his weight from foot to foot and cracking each one of his fingers. Hank could smell his uneasiness and trepidation.

"I’m not disappointed, not really." Hank put down airbrush and the can of sealant. There were little blue hairs caught in the bubbles of the paint. "Do you need anything?"

Alex shook his head, shivered. It was early November and the hangar wasn’t insulated well, but Hank hardly felt the draft of the chill of the cement floor where he knelt. “I want to—Apologize,” Alex said. “For losing Raven, and letting that happen to Charles.”

"You didn’t lose Raven. We all messed up out there, but we didn’t lose her. She was set on that path before we had even left the house." Hank wanted to hide, but his size and his fur made him feel like there was no where for him to go, even in the house, even if he still looked human. "You could just help me take care of him once in a while."

"I can’t," Alex said. "Jesus, I can’t do that." Alex picked up a socket wrench and grasped it so hard that his knuckles turned white. "I think I’m gonna head out for a while. Just wanted to let you know, I guess."

"Well, you’ve always had a knack for keeping up appearances like that. Alex, it’s over now. You can’t just feel guilty all the time—"

"You mean like you do?" Alex wouldn’t look at him. "Don’t be a fucking idiot, Hank. I’m gonna be gone for a while." He tossed his amplifier onto the workbench. The newest prototype was smaller and helped trap more solar energy, but its aim tended to veer left. "I’m trying to be nice here. Jesus. I don’t need you to pity me."

"It’s not pity—"

"I don’t care anymore," Alex said. His voice was small and heavy, like he had a stone in his throat. "I don’t fucking care."

"Don’t be a child, Alex. You need to care, that’s your job now. I can’t take care of Sean and Charles and now you.”

"I’ve never needed someone to take care of me.” He kicked the workbench and laughed, although it was deep and strained. A few pieces of scrap metal fell to the ground. “I’ll see you later, Bigfoot.”

There was a second—or a few seconds—when Alex turned his back and began to weave through the guts of the jet, where Hank felt a stinging coldness in his stomach and a tight tingling in the nerves of his fingers. He felt like he should apologize, say something to make Alex stay, if only for the sake of Charles. For the sake of them all, he hoped.

"So you’re just gonna go, like Angel? Like Raven?"

"Maybe they had the right idea," Alex said over his shoulder.

The night stretched on after that, cold and noiseless and unsurprising. Hank expected Alex to come sauntering back in, to throw another barrage of insults at him, then laugh or smirk or do anything self-assured before the night was out. Alex never came back, but still Hank hoped.

He gave up on the Blackbird and instead fiddled with the amplifier on the workbench. He took it apart, though his fur caught in the wiring and he burned himself with the soldering gun more than once. He worked on it for hours, slowly and quietly, as if Alex would come in and thank him or Charles would call him up for breakfast and ask to see his newest accomplishment. No one came, but still he worked.

:::

When Hank came into the kitchen with Charles the next day Sean was sitting by himself. He was eating Cheerios, dry. He refused look at either of them long, but Hank watched as Charles’s face fell. Hank watched as he wheeled himself away and into his study. You can close the bunker for now, said Charles’s mind. The kitchen was very quiet, and the day broke slowly, clouded over from the New York winter.


	2. #2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As seen on the blog: http://pfcsummers.tumblr.com/post/87048392168/all-i-have-to-say-2-hank-alex-vietnam-au

1962\. Westchester, New York.

Alex found Hank sitting on a cot in the bunker the night he changed, but a few hours before. He had meant to go down there to discharged the nervous and solar energy he accumulated throughout the day. His skin thrummed from Kennedy’s address and the light sunburn that pinched freckles onto his shoulders.

"Do you always lurk down here, or is this just a special bonus?" He didn’t intend to sound cruel, it just came naturally to the timbre of his voice. "Have your Playgirl zines hidden down here?"

"Please, Alex. Not tonight. Just give it a rest, would you?" He had a syringe in his hand that was filled with a liquid so green it looked like how Alex imagined poison would look, or radioactive waste.

”Not a chance.”

"Fine." Hank took the cap off the needle and squirted a bit of the fluid out. 

"You wanna file a complaint? Because I can take one down, you know." Alex scuffed his sneakers against the floor, then took a seat next to Hank on the cot he had dragged out from the storage closet in the back of the bunker for when he would nap after firing off blast after blast of mismanaged plasma. The fabric smelled like burned hair.

Hank ignored him. Instead he fiddled with the syringe in his hands, tapping the glass and the needle with his fingernails. “Do you ever wish you weren’t born a mutant?”

"God, every day. To be able to not have to worry about if I’m going to demolish someone’s house or burn a person to death if I move wrong? Yes. I’d give anything. I’d be stupid not to." The pressure of the night and the following day made Alex honest for the first time since he came into Charles’s care.

"Even if it’s who you are?"

"What are you on, man? If all I add up to is just some shitty blast of energy that no one can really control—that well, thanks—then I might as well just jump off a fucking bridge. I mean, what’d be the point then? It’s just a piece, you know? Like cutting your hair.”

"I think this is the most articulate you’ve ever been, Summers."

"We’re all probably gonna die tomorrow. I don’t see the point in beating around the bush anymore than I already am."

Alex hadn’t thought of it before he said it, but he was most likely right. He was scared. They were all scared. Sean was too young to really feel the terror of dying, but not the fear of being hurt; Raven was bold and self-assured, which would probably keep her alive, but even she hid herself under layers of fake skin; Charles and Erik were impenetrable, and had the courage of those who had already suffered once and would not tolerate such suffering again, but that courage came from the dread of darker evils; Alex was used to being beaten down, but had learned that he wanted to live even if it meant fist fights, solitary, friendlessness, and he was loathe to lose it; Hank was only brave in that he thought he should be, due to his seclusion and intelligence, but he was inexperienced and gentle. They were scared, honest and frightened of the next day.

"I want to die normal," Hank said. "The circumstances are going to be suspicious as-is, if we’re headed towards Cuba. I want my body to be—presentable." Hank had slipped off his shoes and was grasping one of the cot’s bars with the fingers of his feet.

"Cry me a river."

"I’m serious, Alex."

"Jesus, so am I. But I don’t need a soapbox and a handkerchief to get my point across." Alex took a lighter—an expensive metal Zippo—out of his jeans and played with the striking mechanism. "Gonna beef up before the big day, Bozo?"

"Good god, Alex, you think I’m on steroids?”

Alex laughed, and it echoed in the bunker. “No need to make it sound dirty. Man, have you ever not been scandalized in your life?”

"Yes," Hank said. "Every time you decide not to talk."

Alex shrugged. The burn marks down the body of the bunker were evenly spaced along their spiral, and he wondered how Charles and Hank had managed to extinguish them without getting caught in a flurry of chemical foam.

Hank put the syringe against his arm, then sighed and put it down on the cot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean it.”

"Okay," Alex said.

They sat there for hours as the night broke. Every few minutes one of the lamps in the bunker would flicker, but they never burned out. The syringe with the serum rolled around on the fabric of the cot as Alex adjusted how he sat.

Tiredness set in with the quiet, and it made Alex feel like he was foolish. The fingers on Hank's feet curled into his soles. Then Hank put his socks and shoes back on, lacing them tightly.

"Do you want some? It’s not steroids. It’s a serum. I can probably make one for you that’s more of an energy depressant, or something. In these ones I isolated the alleles that control the outward appearance of our—that is, Raven’s and my mutations. If I’ve turned them off correctly, they’ll hide her skin, and my feet." He paused for a moment, then picked up the syringe again. "I’ll be normal."

"Bullshit. Your feet are still gonna be fucking huge.”

"Can’t you just be happy for me? Why do you have to just—ruin things? Why are you even here?”

Alex stood from the cot, and for a moment his chest felt hot and tight as though his plasma was building and ready to release. “I’m here because maybe I want to be. And I can’t be happy over this shit. Not if you’re gonna try and walk through life on a cheat. I thought you were one of those A students, I thought you hated cheating. I guess I read you wrong.”

"This is my choice, Alex."

"This is not—it’s never a choice. It wasn’t in the past and it won’t be in the future. It isn’t now. You can’t just—you can’t just rewrite your own DNA. That’s just … I don’t know what that is. It’s wrong."

"What, like being a faggot?"

Alex looked at him in a way that Hank had only seen when he looked at himself. It was something like betrayal, or realizing the openness of a long-hidden secret.

"I would never call you that."

"Sometimes I feel like you would."

"But I wouldn’t. You don’t—you don’t get it. Nevermind.”

There were no windows in the bunker, of course, but outside it was nearly dawn. The quietude of the bunker permeated Alex’s stillness, making him seem rooted to the cement with a permanent look of guilt or agony in the set of his mouth and the jut of his brow. Hank capped the syringe and walked to the bunker’s door.

"We’re not going to die tomorrow," Alex said. He followed a few strides behind Hank with his hands tugging on bits of thread from his leather jacket. "Okay? Listen to me, we’re not going to die. Charles knows what he’s doing, I guess. I mean chances are he does." He watched Hank unlock the door. "I’m sorry," he said.

"I know you are." Hank grabbed Alex’s face, careful with large, clammy hands, and kissed him on the mouth. "It’s okay. I’m sorry too."

For a long moment Alex said nothing. He coughed and looked at the ground. “I really, really, don’t believe you right now.”

It couldn’t have been that easy, Alex thought. Hank was always set apart from the rest of them, mostly because he was better. He was faster, smarter, kinder, less impulsive. He was genuine and carefree, at least when Alex didn’t take it upon himself to to humiliate him. And now this: Hank would always be better then him, it seemed. More bold, more self-aware than the rest of him. Alex wanted to love him for that, but instead his kindness and his kiss made Alex feel like he had been played. Like it was pity. Like Hank had always known that he was the way he was, and was waiting to throw it in his face.

"Don’t ever do that again," Alex said. His voice caught in this throat and he swallowed hard.

Hank didn’t look at him. “I thought you wanted me to.”

"I don’t. Not anymore."

"Okay," Hank said.

Hank went up the stairs, and eventually the tap of his shoes faded out of the hallway. Alex stood, leaning on the banister. He was tired, and burst open, and his mouth felt chapped but in a soothing way. it was morning, or it would be soon. He went to his room and slept.


	3. #3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, found on the blog: http://pfcsummers.tumblr.com/post/88238133768/all-i-have-to-say-3-hank-alex-vietnam-au

1962\. A beach in Cuba.

In the midst of the scurry of jet parts and the flurry of Angel’s wings beating against the humid air of the coast, Hank and Alex stood side-by-side. They seemed for that moment to be companions, to be something akin to brothers in arms, and Alex felt it resonate in his chest. Part of him was proud, but part of him felt isolated. Sometimes the burn of his mutation would swell up inside of him, like he was being filled with steamed milk that stuck to his sides and lungs, and this moment of solidarity was like that. Firm. Resolute. Something to hold onto against the beach’s harsh wind, something to call teamwork.

Most of the fight left his mind in a rush. The instincts he honed in prison—those of preservation, of reaction, of spitfire aggression—had saved him. Hank had also saved him, at least when Alex remembered that he needed such, when he remembered that they fell, his neck bound by Azazel’s tail, and his arm caught by Hank’s foot.

(Hank’s foot, which was more like Hank’s hand. In the hangar, before take-off and the Mach-2 flight to Cuba, Alex was fixated on those feet. When Hank walked up, changed and blue and roaring, he was shoeless, and the fingers of his feet—because they were by no means toes—kept his stride soft.

"I think I have a new name for you," Alex had said. "Beast."

And Hank, who before would have cowered, chuffed like a tiger and set his shoulders.)

After impact, and the boat, and then Sean, and the crash landing, Alex still only pictured Hank and himself standing with their bodies angled towards one another, waiting for something. For the first shot, he supposed.

There were many shots—missiles, actually, and the familiar bite of someone else leaving, except in instead of it being an inmate or his parents or anyone else who was loose in his life, it was a fixed point, someone who was part of the bedrock. Raven didn’t look back when Erik offered her his hand.

There was sand in his mouth, and blood from where he bit the inside of his cheek when Sean careened into the beach. Erik yelled, Charles rebuffing, and Moira, still back in the body of the Blackbird, called for help. The missiles came, they went, and Moira and Erik shot Charles.

Alex watched Hank’s face, his expressions now more apparent than ever with his fur twitching with every small movement of his lip or eyebrows, as Raven left. He felt the heat and tightness inside his chest again, because Hank was changed because of Raven, and now Raven was leaving.

He said nothing as Hank tried to apply medical care with their limited scraps of supplies. “Go get some branches or something, or a piece of some metal siding if it isn’t burned,” Hank said. “We have to stabilize his neck and carry him out of here. Maybe a boat can lend us a radio, or something.”

"Yes, yes carry on." Charles was sallow, and when Hank looked at his back there was a large bloodstain.

Alex did as he was told. Charles, after he was situated onto the poorly made litter, was light to carry. It was as though losing his legs meant he well and truly lost them, as if the weight was never there to begin with.

Charles was very quiet as Moira and Sean tried to get a transmission across. “It’s not going to work,” Charles would mumble. “They know we’re mutants. They know.”

“Well figure something out—Come on, let’s get him into the Blackbird.” Hank wrapped a makeshift brace around Charles’s neck and slid him onto a litter that Alex had pieced together. “On three.”

They kept quiet in the plane for hours, sitting close together as the sun set. Despite it being Cuba the night was cold, the sand was cold, the wind of the ocean was cold and roaring. The warships were gone from the horizon. Alex shivered. He rubbed his hands over his chest where he was bare from the burnout of his amplifier. Sean and Moira were talking with Charles, while Hank fiddled with the radios again.

“They’ve definitely started something,” Hank said, quietly. “Statistically speaking, with all the men who were on those ships knowing how many of us were here, on this beach … it’ll be unavoidable.”

“What? Asking for help?” Alex scooted over on the sand to sit on a twisted piece of steel next to where Hank was crouching.

“Having the government come after us.” After a moment he stopped fiddling with some arrangement of knobs and switches, tossing the headphones onto a pile of burned wiring. “This is my fault.”

“Now that is some grade-A shit, of the bovine variety,” Alex said. “I mean,” he looked at Charles over his shoulder. He was laughing while Sean made some sort of dumb joke. “I have tenure in that area. Like a six-year track or something. Compared to the rest of us, and that’s counting Charles, you’ve only done good shit.”

“’Good shit?’”

“You know what I mean.”

Hank looked like he was trying not to smile. There was sand and debris in his hair, making his blue coat look whitish and frosted in the cold of the night. “I guess I do,” he said.

Alex looked at his hands, then dusted some sand off of one of Hank’s legs that was curled next to him. “Starting with the plane. I mean yeah it’s shit now, but fuck, we lived. We fucking lived. And now we know we can fight, at lest defend ourselves with some dignity.”

“Except you were helpless for half of it. Be happy I bothered to cut you out of your ejection seat instead of deciding to leave you hanging.”

“If you want to call it that.” Alex was still cold, and now the cave of the Blackbird was seeping with the chill of sand and steel. Some of the electrical work was still blinking. Hank’s eyes caught he light and seemed to reflect it back, boring into Alex when he glimpsed over to him.

There was a beat of peace. The tide was in and a soothing hush. A few crabs were picking around the body of the Blackbird and climbing on the knot of palm frawns that were stuck into various pieces of rubble and still-burning jet fuel. If Alex could have seen the moon he was sure he would have enjoyed it, at least somewhat. He wished he could see beauty in these kinds of things, like Charles or Moira could. Not in the sense that it would be romantic, but that it would give him a sense of relaxation, or confidence that the world continued on despite the shit that mucked up around him. Alaska was never this kind, and Honolulu was a too distant memory. He thought that perhaps if he could remember his childhood he would appreciate the idea of a night on the sand more, or the luxury of surviving another plane crash.

“When I was a kid I was in a crash like this,” he said. “My parents died. My dad was the one flying the plane, I think. That’s what I was told. I didn’t die then, so I figured, last night, that if I could survive that when I was a fucking kid, then I could probably survive whatever the fuck would happen today. I have lasers coming out of my abs for fuck’s sake.”

Hank’s toes flexed in the rubble, picking up a piece of siding then putting it back. “Technically they aren’t lasers. You’re more like a bitchy solar panel who shoots his mouth off too often.”

“Hank McCoy, did you just give me shit back?” Alex smiled down at his hands. His chest hurt form the cold, but also from relief.

Hank smiled at him. “I’m learning,” he said. “I figured it’d be best to overcome adversity while I still had a chance. Save myself any further embarrassment.”

Sean and Moira were sitting at the edge of the plane, both of them with their heads leaning against smooth pieces of debris that clung to the raw opening of the wreck. Sean looked more pale and young, taken from the safest part of his childhood and pushed into something too adult. 

“I’m sorry, Alex.” Hank took a hold of Alex’s arm, and brought it away from his chest.

“Don’t. Just, don’t.”

“What is it this time?”

“It’s not safe,” Alex said. He tugged his arm back to his chest, and curled his knees up into his shoulders. “Shit.”

“The chances of someone finding us right now is probably nil—“

“I don’t have my fucking amplifier, Tesla.” Alex bit on his lips until they bled. The sand and salt stung his mouth, but he didn’t stop nipping or licking until a drop went down his chin and landed on the bare spot on his chest.

Hank crowded into his space, pulling Alex’s limbs open and pushing him into his side. “You’re freezing.”

“I’m fine. I’ve been fine.”

“Jesus, Alex. Just shut up.”

“Why the fuck should I?”

“Because Charles is hurt and trying to sleep.”

Charles was in fact asleep on his litter, with Sean and Moira nodding off by his feet. The lights from the radio flickered but the airwaves were silent and smudged.

Alex didn’t say anything, but he continued to chew on his lips. Hank was looking at him with his yellow animal eyes and pinning him to the walls of the Blackbird. Something about his new body, the Beast, appealed to Alex. Maybe it was of his lack of beauty, or the natural rawness of his look. He wasn’t like anything Alex had ever seen, and it was refreshing.

“Do you know what time it is?” Alex said.

Hank looked at his bare wrist, and then huffed quietly out of his nose. “Not sure. I could check outside and make an estimate if you’d like.”

“No,” Alex said, “I’ll be okay.” The heat in his chest was gone, and the day’s adrenaline was drained from his limbs. “I’m gonna freeze to death out here. Damn, what a fucking way to go, huh?”

“Just come here—honestly I have no idea how I put up with you, or why I put up with you.”

“Inherent goodness.”

Hank smiled. Alex smiled too.

The tide began to recede, and the smell of seaweed crept up from the surf. It had been hours at least, Alex figured, but he didn’t feel tired enough to sleep. Sean had moved to sleep against the side of Charles’s litter, and Moira had curled onto a pile of palm frawns.

Alex took off his gloves, then wiped at his lips. “I feel like you’re going to apologize again, Bigfoot.”

“I think my learning curve has caught up.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means,” Hank said, dragging Alex against his side and resting his chin atop his head, “that I can tell when you’re going to be a little shit.”

“Fuck off,” Alex said, but he was laughing.

“Can I say that I’m proud of how things turned out today, or would that be trite?” The night had gotten dark enough that even Alex’s adjusted eyes had a hard time making out the finer details of the broken wiring or the play of blue and auburn hairs on Hank’s arms and legs. His lips were chapped beneath the blood, and he tried not to lick them as a distraction.

“Well, you could say I’m right for starters. Since I fucking told you we weren’t going to die today.”

Hank pressed Alex closer. “After you came in whining that we were doomed for slaughter.”

“I was right in the end, and that’s all that matters, you little shit.”

“Little?”

“Shove it, Tesla,” Alex said. “It’s not a bad thing, you know. All this. I can tell by how you’re sitting. What you look like—it’s not a bad thing. At least it’s just how you are on the outside, not what you are on the inside.” By now he was smothering himself in the cover of Hank’s fur, trying to hold onto his warmth. Sleep was clawing at him. “You know?”

“Are you always so philosophical when you’re in unexpected situations?” Hank’s voice was deep in his chest, purring like the sea on the sand, and Alex felt at ease.

“No,” Alex mumbled.

There was a long moment of silence, and Alex closed his eyes. Hank’s breaths were deep and sparse, as if he were holding them in as long as he could. It was predictable, and solid as the new muscle on Hank’s sides and arms.

“I’m proud of you, Alex,” Hank said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Alex let himself go into sleep.


	4. #4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the blog: http://pfcsummers.tumblr.com/post/89037394268/all-i-have-to-say-4-hank-alex-vietnam-au

1970\. A jungle outside of An Khe.

Remarkably it had not been difficult for Alex to be deployed. He did not lie about his mutation, in fact he demonstrated to a four-star general how he had honed himself. In a bunker beneath Camp Sill on the watery edge of the Atlantic, Alex punched through fifteen feet of concrete, rebar, and steel plating from fifty yards away. The general said he had a knack, and personally stamped him 1A. Welcome home, he said. Alex said nothing.

The jungle was more then he—and the six other mutants in his squad—had expected. They were all ranked Private First Class, but Alex, being the angriest and most experienced in the sting of fighting unfairly, was elected their hypothetical lieutenant.

"It’s too fucking hot," Cullus said. He was a sharpshooter with a third eye directly below his left which had vision bordering on eagle-like. His human eyes, as he called them, required correctional lenses. Otherwise he was tall and dark haired, and entirely too familiar. "I feel like I’m goofed. My lenses are fogged again."

"I don’t know why you keep bringing them out of camp," Alex said.

Cullus shrugged. “Habit I guess.”

Toad—that’s what they all called him because he told them no other name, and his dog tags were blank—laughed at them. “Aren’t you all supposed to be evolved? Jesus almighty,” he said. “Talk about paradise.”

Alex had found out, thanks to Hank’s annoying ingenuity and tenacity years prior, that he heat, the thickness in the air, only made him absorb energy faster. “It’s more than just the sun,” Hank had said. “It’s heat energy, from water and air. Temperature? That’s just measuring how much energy a particle has. For you, the hotter the environment the better. It’s the reason you’re still so young—you absorb energy faster than the decomposition rate of your cells. You’re incredible,” Hank had said. Alex had kissed him after that.

The jungle was more than hot and damp. It was thick with rice paddies and shit fields and hamlets and Viet Cong. They had to carry machetes to cut through the foliage, some of it so dense that light couldn’t come through and Alex became lethargic. And they carried machine guns, the radio, ammunition on belts, everything a platoon of twenty men would carry, but condensed onto the backs of seven mutants.

It was slow going. They had patrols that could go for weeks, sometimes deep into the mountains, through ravines with webs of traps, or rivers that were thick with mud and algae and bloated corpses.

After they set up camp for the night and had dug their fox holes, and Toad was out sitting in a flooded patch of reeds or other grasses, and Alex was sore and sluggish from the darkness, Cullus started a small fire with his heat tabs and some Sterno. It was humid still, but the dry heat of the fire reminded Alex of Charles’s mansion, when he had charred rings into the walls and ceiling of the bunker.

“Got anyone back home?” Cullus asked. He was fiddling with a worn pocket-sized photo in his hands while he kicked soggy plants out of the fire pit. “This is my girl, Margie. Ain’t she a sweet thing?” Margie, as far as Alex could tell, was a shapely woman, and blatantly human. Her hair was dyed cherry red, but her skin and eyes were dark and attractively natural. “She thinks I got into a shooting accident when I was a kid—I have this patch I ware.” He fished a worn piece of black leather from his flak jacket. “No one’s the wiser.”

Alex stuck his hands out. His nails were bitten down and grimy, black as cigar butts and gummed with oil.

“So?” Cullus said.

“No,” Alex mumbled. “No there’s no one really.”

“Nah man, I can tell by your face. Don’t gotta hide it. Not swing that way, hm? Because, let me tell you, I’ve learned not to pick and choose. Mutants can’t really be exclusive, you know?”

The night was quiet, but all seven of them were ready in case gunfire began to rain down on them. Sometimes when the leaves would stutter in the wind at night, or in the early morning on rounds, they would all jump to their rifles, or with their fists out, waiting. It wasn’t anticipation as much as it was dread—“The end’s gonna come,” Toad would say. “One-way fuckin’ ticket straight up to the Big Guy.”

Alex kicked out the fire. “Watch’s over. We should burrow.”

His foxhole was shallow but dry. Alex clicked on his flashlight, something that could get them all mortared into dust if he was careless, and unfolded a plastic bag filled with stationary, envelopes, and stamps. It was early in his tour, but still he hadn’t written back to his only home, back to Hank. All he had to write with was a stub of a grease pencil.

_Bozo—not much to say. It’s hot as fuck here, or hotter. PFC Callus had to take a shit break when we were in the bush once and he said it felt cooler than the fucking air._

_But still, it’s better than being stared at. There are some mutants. It’s okay._

_-A_

The jungle drummed with guns a few clicks away, over the crest of the mountain to the north. There was a thrumming like an airplane, a sound that Alex had come to love from summers at Charles’s house, in the back workshop where Hank played architect to rebuilding the Blackbird. He tried to guess the type of engines and how many planes are bombing over the mountain, but the water and the ferns and the moss above the foxhole took in the sound like mucky sponges.

He folded the letter and wrapped it in plastic, sealing and addressing the envelope before he stowed it in his flak jacket, in a tear that kept it between the steel and the dirty drab of the fabric.

The night bled on, endless and flowing like the Song Tra Bong that stagnated and smelled throughout the country there. He wanted to write back, tell about how even when they were miles off the stench would cloy and stick to them, and how Toad would smile with his weak sallow lips and bask. Or to tell how he still feared being trapped, ever since the string of plane crashes that caught him in his life, but the necessity of checking tunnels and digging holes to sleep in had pushed his fear and his judgment far into the back of his mind. Or how he missed the smell of sanitary wipes and the cleaning solution that Hank used on all of his instruments to cut the grease off like butter from the stick, and how sometimes he would watch Hank scour and resurface the mirrors on the second floor where the rooms were, and that the chemical smell was harsh, but smoother than the carried over dust of the Orange that was dropped. He would admit to fear, but not to his homesickness.

When he crawled out of the foxhole it was day, but he couldn’t tell the time. Cullus was awake, and the other mutants, whom Alex would never learn the names of as to keep the guilt of their probable deaths by gunfire or burns from his consciousness as a leader, were eating canned peaches over pound cakes, and other C-rations that were airlifted in a few days prior.

“Can’t say the army didn’t deliver,” Alex said.

“Don’t I know it!” said Cullus. There were ashes smeared onto his face like bruises, or football stripes. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his helmet cocked to the left. “Damn, almost like easy living. Margie’d die over here—complain about all the damn candy.”

Each of them were shucking empty bags of M&Ms over their shoulders, their mouths smeared with chocolate and candy dye.

“Roll up and roll out. Twenty miles to hump today,” Alex said. His map was marked with grease and torn, one quadrant even nicked from a bullet, and barely readable. “Heading south for a hamlet HQ found in the jungle. Heavy firepower.”

“So you mean just you?” Toad said. “Fucking one man army right here. Death punch. Just, boom.”

“Shut the hell up,” Cullus said.

“Stand down, and line up. Toad in front on point. You want the heavy gun? Congrats, you just got it.” Alex flipped both of them the finger and adjusted the letter in his jacket. “Move out.”

The ruck was quick and smooth in the shade. In the open paths they found water buffalo, cats, or women tending thick rice paddies. The younger men wanted to see if they could shoot their initials into whatever animal they came across.

By the time the hamlet came into view they had sacked two rifles along the march, and seventy rounds of ammunition. Their packs were lighter and slick from sweat, but the weight in their chests punched through their skins and pulled them forward.

It only took Alex twenty minutes to incinerate the fort and a swath of forest surrounding it. His arms and chest were sunburned when he finished, striped with violent pink lashes that spiraled down his fingers and crossed over his chest and abdomen.

“Find a spot to dig in,” he said afterwards.

”Twink’s got some spark,” Toad said.

Alex kicked him in the balls and left him on watch for the entire night.

:::

In the jungle time ran differently. Sometimes it would span along the horizon, each day lasting the span of a week, or a month, running forever on like the path they humped and drudged along for hour after hour. On those days, when Alex could not tell his feet from his hands from his eyes, he would scribble onto stray pieces of paper and jam them all, sometimes ten at a time, into an envelope addressed to Hank.

_I’ve seen this path before, or maybe it was another one back home, but I swear, there was this one rock that looked like Sean’s hair. I wanted to take it with me, but it was too heavy, like Sean’s entire body was stuck inside, and I couldn’t just leave him there. I wanted to switch places._

_-A_

He wrote:

_Sometimes I hear Charles talk to me at night. In my head, there’s something whispering. The mountains are so quiet, when we’re tucked down on recon, that he can speak to me. He says I can’t come back. I can’t come back. Can I come back?_

_-A_

And:

_My father died in a plane crash. I was going to die in a plane crash. I’ll still die in a plane crash. Today a man named Sanders shot off part of his foot to get medical evac. But he can spit smoke, so I don’t know if they’ll let him._

_-A_

But he only set one, fully addressed and sealed, to the house, during the moments when time was fixed and he could tell what day and month it was, and his chest wasn’t hot or sore from the cache of cosmic energy that made him skittish and angry while steam rose from the palm leaves:

_Bigfoot:_

_I can’t imagine how the states must feel now, or that mansion. Cold? I miss that, I don’t know if I can feel cold anymore. Makes it hard to sleep, hard to eat. It’s like my skin’s going to burst like one of the red tree fruits here, too fat with juice and the skin splitting before it rots. I’m rotting._

_-A_

Most times, regardless of if the day was long or short, they took fire. Toad took shrapnel to his eyes, splinters of wood and stone and debris. There was blood and some sort of yellowish pus, and Alex lost himself in a rapid blaze from his chest and fists in uncoordinated bursts.

Afterwards Toad was indignant as the only one who was injured. “I’m fucking fine,” he kept saying. And he was: the mucous membranes in his tissues sealed, cleaned, and scarred his wounds within a few days. His eyes were more buggy than usual, and cold as a fish’s, and so he took to wearing goggles.

Alex refused to write to Hank about it, mostly because his hands did not stop shaking for days afterwards, and his relapses, his required hours of recharging, stretched out, long as a week of lateral time. Sometimes Cullus left Alex in his foxhole and took the other five mutants out on a parole walk, but he never told him.

Four months into the tour away from base, two months after his last letter, and one month after Alex was able to write steadily again, they took a reprieve at a small hamlet that was occupied by three platoons and a medical evacuation unit. It was ramshackle and fortified with walls of mud and stones and sharpened pikes made out of small sickly bog trees. There were two of these hamlets back-to-back, meaning within the same forty miles of jungle.

The nights were rougher, with over-taxed GIs and the secluded members of Black Ops meandering together in lean-tos and tents made out of quilted tarpaulins.

“This reminds me of when I was in prison,” Alex said to Cullus. They were cleaning their rifles in Alex’s tent, a can of Salisbury steaks between them. “And I mean real prison—Super Max. One hour of rec a day and otherwise you get a bed made out of cement and a window that somehow always has the sun burning into it. You could feel it in the air there, this kind of tension that wasn’t really like holding a grudge, but more like when you get too many guys hopped up on testosterone and they haven’t had a fuck in months, probably, and they find the little guy and just go in for the fucking kill.”

“Brutal,” Cullus said.

“The army should train for shit like that,” Alex murmured. “I’m talking emotional manipulation. The Viet Cong? If they keep up this sniper shit we’ll all be headed out to Japan for med-evac because we’ll have shot our hands and feet off to get away from the crazy out here.”

After a week of staying at the hamlet he wrote another letter, even though the heat made him flush from energy and jittery.

_Tesla, get this:_

_Some Lt Col. was fragged in a hamlet twenty miles south of us. I heard they were scraping bits of him off the tents for days afterwards. Real spook stuff._

_They take our blood a lot. It reminds me of Charles’s mansion, I guess. The lab. You and those fucking glass jars—beakers? Fuck, I don’t know._

_-A_

“Writing to your girl again?” Cullus asked. “One lucky gal, if I can say so.”

“You can’t. I’m not writing to anyone.”

“Not writing to a girl, you mean.”

The pressure built up in Alex’s chest again, like the time when he heard that Erik had thrown Sean off the massive satellite on Charles’s property.

“What’s his name?” Cullus's face was as open and basic as a yawning oyster, his eyes and teeth the only thing white and clean about him.

“He has a lot of names, but I never fucking use them. It drives him up the wall—he probably hates me by now, and just throws these in the trash.” Alex shook the bag of letters, scrunching it in his hands and smudging the grease. “Makes me feel like I’m a useless shit most of the time.”

“Tough guy?”

Alex laughed. “McCoy? God, maybe. I wish. He’s just super fucking smart. A god damn Einstein, builds planes and invents shit in his spare time. It’s insane. When I was in prison he had already graduated from some Ivy League university and gotten a job at the CIA.”

“He’s probably in a think tank now, hm? Or is he one of those ‘enlightened intellectual’ fucks?” Cullus was smoking, blowing perfect rings of brownish smoke into the heart of the tent. He tapped his ashes into a tin cup.

“No, he’s huge and blue and I wants to fly planes and take care of his handicapped dad.” Rain fell, as it had been for the past nine weeks, and it made a static silence in the tent. “We haven’t seen each other in a while.”

Cullus just raised his eyebrows, his third eye glinting like buffed topaz. “Shit, you’re just a romantic at heart, aren’t you? Putting me and Margie to shame.”

“Fuck off,” Alex said, but it was light and he smiled, and meant it.

“Keep that smirk off your face, otherwise Toad might see you have some sense of humanity and decide to stick a grenade in your foxhole. Don’t want you to end up like that poor lieutenant colonel.”

“Maybe if I had a rank.” Alex assembled his rifle and tucked it away in his bedroll. He took out a deck of cards from the band on his helmet, and dealt a game of solitaire.

“He’s shifty,” Cullus continued. “I don’t trust people who wear goggles like some sort of shitty Mafioso on a bike.”

“You think he’s a grease man?”

“Nah, but I know he gets bitter about guys who aren’t into women. Bet he’d call you a deviant. But you could just toast his slimy ass. I mean really, of any guy to try and spike? You're safe as mouse in a wheat field.”

Alex’s hands shook again as he played his cards, but his skin wasn’t flushed and his heart was calm. Killing followed him like a sunburn, stinging and red on his back, perpetual and violent. Hank had offered to give him some cure years ago, and he felt that perhaps that had been the wrong choice to turn it down.

Their orders came the next day: an assignment for four months in the deep of the jungle, with fewer check points and supply drop-offs than usual. Alex wrote one last letter, to send out, and another to keep strapped to his leg in case he’s nailed in the skull or neck or straight through the balls. He kept it short, and hoped that it served as a warning as well as a goodbye if the need arose. He wanted to say something about love, but Cullus was watching him with his third eye wide open, and Toad stood just down wind—he could probably tell what words Alex scribbled just by smelling the pencil.

He wrote:

_I’m going out today._

_-A_

He sent the letter out before he left into the green.


	5. #5

A stack of letters arrived to Alex’s hamlet two days after his deep jungle departure. They read (with their redaction):

Alex,

I can’t say I’m surprised by your laconic tendencies. I’m assuming that you must not have much time to write when you’re wading through the jungle. The networks—and I’m watching all three of them (plus PBS, just to be sure) say that there’s napalm and huge fires and diseases from the mosquitoes. They say that the Viet Cong are less dangerous than the trench foot and malaria.

When you get time, write back.

-

Alex,

There are other mutants? What are their mutations—if you can say so. I don’t see the point of trying to write them down if the whole letter ends up blacked out like an empty crossword. I could try to configure some sort of pigment penetration acid that dissolves the overlaying inks, but I feel like my time could be better spend elsewhere. Especially with Charles.

Charles. He’s … well. He talks a lot these days. About what I don’t really have the place to say.

-

Alex,

You can always come back. It was your choice to leave, remember? I hope that doesn’t come across as accusatory, even though it should be. Erik—Magneto—used to tell me to follow my gut feeling, even though in the past it’s never treated me well, but I have this feeling that I should be angrier. I blame the war—is that right? Morally, I mean. I’m sure you’ve had your time to ruminate.

-

Alex,

I have a story to tell you. I got your letter—your hands must have been shaking; the letters were nigh illegible. Here we go:

When I was a kid, back in Missouri, I used to run in this corn field that was behind my neighbor’s house—only when the corn was over three feet tall, so I could turn my shoes of and run for acres through the loam. Corn leaves, as it turns out, sting and hurt really if you step on them right. I usually did, since, well, you know. My feet.

I had always been smart, and so when my does started growing (and I don’t know if I could even call them toes—they’ve always looked like damaged hands to me, like god had taken some gorilla and shaved him, and that was me) I tried to figure out how to hide them. We always wore shoes in the house, because Mom told me it was polite to, even in your own home, so that didn’t become a problem.

The problem was my friend—my first and last—Johnnie. Whenever it rained the road turned to mud, no question. It was that kind of Missouri. (I can feel you rolling your eyes at me and calling me a bumpkin, I know you are. You have a knack for alliteration when the mood strikes, unfortunately.) He’d race from the school, shoes and socks thrown into our school bags so that our mothers would only be somewhat livid with us, rather than at the point of damnation. We weren’t stupid—at least I wasn’t. I forgot about my feet since it had been summer and I was used to running through whichever grass field was in rotation, so I pulled my socks and shoes off, tossed them in my bag, and waited for Johnnie to catch up.

After that I was home-schooled. Then I went to university. Then I met you.

The war’s still on.

Write back soon.

And more, towards the bottom of the stack, were rushed, damaged, soaked with some sort of chemical stain and grubby:

I don’t mean to send this, I think.

Something’s wrong—can you feel it? Come back, if you can manage. Even if it means getting discharged. Knowing Charles he can make that disappear off your resumé. It’s—[the text here is redacted].

-

Charles doesn’t want me to tell you this, but he’s in pain. A lot of pain. He’s made some decisions that I wouldn’t hesitate to call unwise, or even drunken.

I made a cure. Charles won’t stop taking it. It’s either that, or the drink, and he can’t stand the idea of his chair anymore. Everyone’s gone for the summer, but I don’t think they’re coming back.

Are you coming back?

My feet are stronger, and my fur is gone into a darker molt. I feel like some fucked up bird. I want to take the cure, but there’s this voice in the back of my head (it’s yours, I swear, even though I don’t think I remember what you sound like anymore. You were never one for talking much, to me anyway. I would ask Sean but—)

-

Alex,

There is a photo circulating of a girl, naked, because she was doused with [the text here is redacted]. Have you seen that?

Did you do that?

[this is scratched out]

I’m sorry.

-

I haven’t spoken to anyone in weeks. Charles is in his own head so much, now that he can’t reach out to others. He’s given himself phantom pains. Sometimes I check him for stroke because I can’t be sure anymore.

Maybe I should try shooting my foot off for med evac. I don’t know where it would get me, except for some sort of mutant farm. Maybe I should try.

-

I took the cure.

Alex, my shoes fit.


	6. #6

1964\. Westchester, New York.

Before the war and after the fight, Alex would sometimes take expansive runs through the wooded lands on Charles’s property. In the mornings when the autumn mists carpeted the lichen and fern beds along the knolls knotted with overgrowth, he would pass through, his feet heavy from the chill and from his own turmoil, making laps about the elm thickets that were sprouting with late foxglove.

Hank had a tendency of resentful sleeping-in, and so a morning escape was not only a gift but a savior, a dignified retreat. The woods, at least, could not spy down on him.

This morning was warmer than usual and so the mists and dews were light and did not fleck up onto Alex’s high socks or the worn cotton of his shorts. His sweat was stiff in his mouth, gritty and bitter.

Some of the trees were knotted with a tangle of choking vines, rough as a cat’s tongue. He heard once that certain types of plants were nearly useless on their own: their stems were neither pulpy boughs nor the soft green flesh of a succulent, and so they were limp and shapeless as they grew, ever reaching out to climb, sprawling out until lack of light killed them off. Starvation. The strangling fig could only thrive if it found a host in the muggy swamp with the fine hairs of its roots and stringy limbs. Only then could they blossom and make play at bearing fruit.

On the property most of the greenery had been trimmed down to neat edges. The elms were tall but pruned into fine beams, the wild rosemary dry and hardy, cut back for the frost, and the lawn was sheered down to a golf range, then sprung open, deep and thick as fescue in the shade of the ashes and the evergreens along the crick that spun like a turret through the edge of the lot.

In all the run was nearly ten kilometers and Alex, whose breath was kept standard by the flush of the sunlight on his back, made himself repeat and repeat until he was heavy with sweat. Until he only could sweat and his chest was stuck with something other than loneliness.

He thought of his mother. The tangle of shrapnel around her body as the plane crashed. He had seen the sand melting into stinging ropes of glass upon impact from the wing tanks bursting. Ever since Alex had felt tight, as if his skin was climbing him and pressing down on his throat, but unable to hold him together.

The sun was strong for autumn. It was close to nine, by the cast of the shadows over the thin vein of the crick. As he curved north, back towards the front facade of the house, Alex saw Charles in his chair, drinking from a thermos and with Hank standing at his side. Hank’s fur was mussed and was tinted the same beige and indigo as the morning sky. Charles was looking back into the house, searching, and Hank’s eyes, yellow and curt as a coyote’s, bore straight at Alex’s dark and damp chest.

Alex fell into a walk, stumbling on the cut of the lawn, and coughed into his arm pit. He sniffed himself, deeply. His mother, from what he could remember or imagine, had hated when he smelled himself. “You’ll set a poor example,” she said. He wasn’t sure for whom.

He smelled like burned hair and scorched earth, like a marching soldier as he sloughed toward the sea, bayonet in hand and pillaging as he went. Hank tossed his head into the wind. Alex could picture the fun on his mane standing at attention, with trepidation.

"Morning," Alex called.

"Lovely one, isn’t it?" said Charles. He tipped his thermos up. It smelled bitter, like old bourbon.

Alex shrugged.

"It’ll be overcast later. Then maybe rain. You’ll probably want to cover up," said Hank. He tilted his head up and away as if he were measuring the zenith of the sun and tasting the wafting salt from Alex’s soggy hair.

Alex huffed and lifted his shirt off. “Sure thing, dollface.”

Hank chuffed, more like a lion than a man, and more disappointed than angry. “Don’t mock me.”

"Wouldn’t dream of it, sourpuss."

Alex’s lungs began to sting, the skin around his throat tighter and and shifting like it did when too much energy thrummed through his blood. Hank’s fingers cinched around his neck.

And the next he was down on the ground, the sky spotted with black, then white, then the clear blue of the horizon over the arch of the trees. Hank was stock still, Charles with his hand pressed against his own forehead, and a grievous look on his face.

"My god," Charles said. His voice was quiet, and grey as paving stone. "Henry—my god.”

Alex coughed and spat on the patio. He could feel the bruises bloom on his throat around small points of pressure where Hank’s inky black claw tips had grazed the peach skin of his neck.

"Fuck off, you bitch," he said.

Hank’s hair ruffled and his gaze dilated, but Charles held him firm.

"Reap what you fucking sow you god damn cretin."

And Hank bellowed, like an alligator prowling on his own territory, coiled and sharp. His blue upper lip curled up into its cleft, and he spat through his teeth. “They should have left you in supermax,” he said.

-

The bunker was dark, as per usual, and cool, cooler than the morning or the evening air. His throat still burned, even up into his sinuses and the back of his head. Occasionally the read caution lights swam before his eyes, but he stood firm and resolute, letting out blast after blast of unfocused energy to cut through the mannequins on the far side of the room.

You can come up, you know, Charles said. Give him some credit for self control. He’s been at it for most of his life.

"This is a mental DMZ, Charles." Alex fired off another round, twisting his back until it popped then strained. His shoulder cramped.

Consider it a friendly suggestion then.

The scorch marks that encircled the bunker’s ceiling and walls overlapped one another in a series of arcs, then ended in a cluster of black, deep and endless as a pit in a field when dusk settled in.

I don’t want to have to read your mind, Alex. But I will if you continue to hurt yourself.

"Hound dog already did it for me, you know." It was more difficult than usual to breathe, and Alex felt the tiredness, the push of the endless days of training and trying and exertion bear down upon him. "I’m tired," he said. "I’m gonna take a fucking nap. Wake me up in week."

Evasion is not resolution, you know.

"Well if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle fucking black. Try again Charles."

Alex pulled a cot out from the back room and fell onto the rough sheets. The pillow was flat and smelled musty, so he shoved his face into it and snuffed.

Pouting isn’t very becoming on young men, last I checked.

"Neither is nosing around in someone’s fucking baggage. Why don’t you go watch Sean get blitzed off of weed and your mom’s stash, huh?"

The bunker went quiet. The creak of the cot was slight, echoing only faintly. Alex kicked his legs up into the air and bit into his pillow. He choked.

"I told him he was better off without his batshit family," Alex said. "And he told me that I was better off in the cell block. And what’s worse," he said, "is that I didn’t mean it. But I think he did. He’s too smart to be some asshole. I swear to fucking god."

And it was quiet, and outside the sunset on the copse of trees, and the crick continued to flow down, slowly as a dying heart, and the lights blared on as the ceiling smoked.


	7. #7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for era-specific racist language against Viet Namese people, and mentions of suicide.

1970\. Viet Nam.

_Excerpt from a letter fragment recovered from John Doe body, died en route to med. evac. to Japan._

_It reads as follows:_

Cullus said he didn’t see anything but I know he did. I do. Cullus is a liar. Cullus said he was looking the other way, that he was taking a piss, that he had been smoking dope and that he didn’t see. Can’t be a court martial if there are not witnesses to report anything. Because he said nothing happened.

But there was a boy and he had a gun and I threw something and he died. Gone. Obliterated. Serrated. Like the statue from Langely but worse because it was his body and it was gone but there was blood and parts of his fingers in the bush, along the trail line and—

I’m telling you I threw something. You need to know this. I threw something and it was either a grenade—it was a grenade. Cullus said he didn’t see one missing from my belt but I know it had to be. No time to look. Took one of Toad’s, probably. There was no crater. There was no crater. There was no crater. This must be important: there was no crater, just burned leaves that were once wide and waxy and so dark green that they looked like painted eyelids, and they watched me. They were smouldering like his fingers and the ammo belt that shucked into pieces from the blast. Somehow I found the nub of his cigarette. I could taste his spit on it.

Cullus aid he didn’t see anything because he was taking a piss and smoking and it was too fast.

We walked down the trail, big guns in the back and me up front because my skin was burning and crawling like the mites on the leaves and tree bark and in the moss we slept on. We have been in the jungle for weeks. Years. I feel thirty, maybe seventeen. Sometime I hear Sea—

My face itches from the gnats and the smell of the peat moss and the shit fields and the steaming loam when it finally is hit by the sun. It rained. Is raining. I wrote another letter but the pencil bled off. The trail was mud and nets of roots and the discarded shit the other soldiers didn’t want to hump. The ones who walked this trail before. Some of them were barefoot. The boy was on the trail. He seemed to be waiting. He seemed to be sleeping. He seemed to be walking. He seemed to be pointing his carbine at me. He seemed to know me. Cullus said he didn’t see anything. The boy seemed to be barefoot, his thighs were all mud and his fingers were ashy and bitten from his teeth and moss gnats and leeches, his hands were stuck with flea bites, and grains of rice. I found them later, near the burning bush, and knew this.

I will never see you again, I’ve realized. Not after this. I know you, and Cullus gives me looks like you would. Your face is narrow. He is afraid. I’m afraid. The mountains are so thick in places that the daylight can’t make the crest or the leafy ridge and I can’t run enough to get out, no matter how hard I apologize. There are only jungle trees and hanging moss and the boys lynched on the trees with the buffalo heads floating in the wells. You wouldn’t like to know this but I want you to so do this. You’re smart. I know you are. You wouldn’t like to know how I’ve burned myself. How I burned that boy.

I tried to collect his ashes, but I think I breathed them in. If I die here it won’t be with honors or medals and my family won’t—

Of course not. What body? What a body. A body. The boy. Cullus stares at me like he knows. Of course not. Of course he does. He does know. He sees these things. He saw me. He sees me. He will see me. He will have seen me. I want to put pins in his eyes and see if I can touch the soft patch of his brain. I will erase it. I will be gone.

*

_Excerpt from a second letter fragment recovered from John Doe body, died en route to med. evac. to Japan._

_It reads as follows:_

For a month it rained in solid sheets of water. Not like New York or Hawai'i or Alaska rain (even Alaska has nicer rain), but actually fucking sheets. Once when I was younger I was at a party with some other foster kids, and we all were playing fish for apples with a bunch of different once we had lifted from a bunch of the corner markets around town. The water was cold and this big fast rush, and solid. Even though you were the one dunking you head into the bathtub--because what else are we going to use, huh?--it was the water hitting you. Trying to kick you out. I've felt that plenty of times before, it's nothing to really shock me anymore.

This is the kind of rain I think about when I picture myself drowning. I can't think of the ocean anymore without feeling messed up and ropey on the inside. I could have done more. So this rain is a fuckin' nightmare, if you can believe it. I'm sure you can. Smart fucker like you, huh? And it went on for a month, or for what felt like a month. We don't know how long we've been here. Toad just yucks it up because he's made for this kind of freak weather, like some salamander crawling out from under his gucked up rock. Sometimes I think he'd want to hide out in the jungle for days, just popping of boys with his semi and watch them fall into the ditches with their rice bags and plastic sandals.

I found the boy's sandals. I have one in my backpack. Part of it is melted, but that's what happens when a cherry bomb goes off. Cullus won't talk to me about it.

Cullus made the most mindfucking shot a while back. Or it was yesterday. I'm never sure. We must have been miles off, somewhere I couldn't even see on a map, and he bags this guy crawling up a vine-covered tree. Just taps the trigger like he's drumming on the table and pop's the guy. He said it was in the back. He said it went all the way through, that if we ever made it to that same tree, which we could never because the jungle changes every time you look away, we'd find a mashed bullet plugging up a beetle hole in the tree with some VC blood as glue. "Hell," he said, "maybe you'd even find the piece of spine he's missing now."

When Cullus shoots he's this whole new man. It's horrifying. It reminds me of--So when he shoots he uses the scope on his third eye, the one on his cheek bone. It's brown just like his human eyes but something about it makes the heat in my blood burn up into my skin. It never fully opens, but can see so far into the horizon that it's like he's looking straight around the earth and into the back of my skull. He's an asshole and a good shot, and he said he didn't see anything when that boy died. But when he shoots he acts like he's about to jump off a bridge and off himself. He goes stiff and almost curled over, with that lower eye partially opened and his teeth bared, and then he just taps the trigger, doesn't even squeeze like we're taught, just barely taps the bitch, and down goes the gook. 

We found a cargo drop once and I ate enough ice cream and M&Ms that I chucked in the bushes. We got the sterno cans together and tried to make some sort of celebratory bonfire, but Toad called us idiots and Cullus said he saw three different VC troling the bush. We had some beer that wasn't too warm. I threw up again. It felt good to do something other than hump a fucking gun and pack through a jungle that was eating me slowly, bite by bite, by the gnats and mosquitoes and the malaria I probably have. Sometimes I sweat so hard that it boils off my skin and I can see the steam. It makes my chest hurt. I'll vomit again.

Listen, don't try and finagle anything for Charles. The man is off the edge enough already. Fuck the Brotherhood. I can't do this. Erick is probably laughing his fucking ass off, pulling bullets off course and pushing them straight towards my head. I want the fucker to burn.

Listen to me, it's dark soon. My hands are burning. Once they melted the butt of my rifle. I tried to shoot a toe off, but the trigger was warped and the fucking thing jammed. Toad said to aim for the thighs, said you'll get out fast that way--

_The rest of the paper is burned here, and cannot be salvaged._


	8. #8

1970\. Viet Nam.

Cullus told a story:

“Have you ever been in Olympia, Washington? The state, not the district. I always have to say it—people don’t know about the west coast all that well, and I’ve gotten so many times, ‘Oh, do you visit the Capital?’ No. I’ve never been.

“Olympia’s an okay place, and the suburbs are decent enough. There’s forest in some of them, depending on how far north or west you are. Where I’m from, even the hicks of Olympia call us rednecks. I had an uncle who used to drive his truck into whatever little town was nearest with his shotgun mounted up in the cab. You could see it no matter which window you looked through. He called it advertising the goods.

“Well, I don’t have to spell it out, do I? My family were rednecks, although not as bad as some of our neighbors. We wore shoes, we had clean clothes, we combed our hair. But I had three older sisters who were all mountain beauties and who made flower crowns out of the dandelion greens they picked from the patch of high grass we called a lawn. And because of my sisters, Elmira, Tanya, and Kelly, we got boys over all the time. Any time of night or day. Sometimes here in this oven of a jungle it feels a lot like home, waiting for those bastards to show themselves in the woods so my father and I could shoot pellets at them. 

“Elmira, Tanya, and Kelly were sweet girls. Are sweet girls. There’s no point in thinking they’re the ones who could die at any minute, although last time I saw Tanya she was beached with twins and her temper was the shortest fuse I’d ever seen it. She always gave her part when some freckled prick came strutting around our place. Half the time she beat me to the pellet gun and fire off a set of rounds before I was even up with my boots on. 

“But, I’m getting off track. Summers I swear to god if you don’t keep me on the line I’m gonna end up all over the place, or I’ll lose track of my story. Just because I can see doesn’t mean I’m always looking.

“This hot-shot named Tag liked to come around in afternoon when my father was out with my uncle and my mother was out doing errands or visiting someone or another. I was born with my eye, although most of the time it didn’t open all the way. It felt gummy, like when you sleep with beach sand on your face and it all migrates up. Tag was a son of a bitch if I ever had the pleasure to meet one, present company excluded. One day he saw my eye open up a bit, the most it had in a while, and he lost it. I was more kicking back in the lawn, actually seeing for the first time. Some people have tried to tell me that when I use all my sight, everything I got, it must be like seeing with glasses on for the first time. 

“But things aren’t clearer, you know? It’s sort of like they’re deeper, that space goes on for a lot longer than you think it does. Grass isn’t just in the foreground, it’s creeping up along the way, and then bunching up around tree trunks like loose socks. 

“I’m not a poet, so you can wipe that look off your pretty blond face, you little queer. And you know I’m not being mean about it, okay. Jeez, it’s like your balls crawl up your asshole whenever you have to sit and listen to someone giving you advice. Brotherly advice! Because we’re probably more related than you think—it’s that neediness and knowing more than you let on. I do that you. I mean, that’s what I’m getting at, at least. So sit down and shut up.

“Tag comes over and sees me looking around with my eye. He was a good shot with rocks, like most of us were, because it was a way to keep the raccoons and possums out of the trash without having to lug around a pellet gun. He whistles to get me to look up, and nails me right in the kisser with his rock. I’m talking river rock, just right in the face. Somehow nothing broke, but this rock was gunky with my own flesh and blood when I found it laying down on the ground. I picked that sucker up and shoved it down my pants as fast as I could. Memories, you know? A fucking photo album moment.

“The thing is, Summers, is that I saw the rock coming. I saw him purse his lips to whistle at me, and I saw his yellow spit fleck out of his mouth and land down his chin. And when he wound up to chuck that rock at me, I saw how he narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips. Like everything else Tag did—and I saw a lot of it because he harped and mooned on Elmira every day, it felt like—he had this full-body clench like he had been sucking on some rotten spent grain. I know boys who did it, and who probably still do it. They stew that shit after they make their half-shot beer, and suck on it like chew. Tag did it with his whole body, moving like he was stuck to himself.

“I wish he had hit me. Beat the shit out of me, banged me against a tree like a carpet and just torn me to shreds. I would have watched every moment of it.

“Kelly saw him running back around our house, and then saw me with a bloody face. She called Tanya, picked up a branch, or something, and went after him. Pumas on a hunt. And they weren’t sweet afterwards, you know. They were this kind of stand-offish way of being nice. They cleaned up their dishes, didn’t take up the toilet when I needed it. They took me along when they went to town, which was brave because I was thirteen and angry and sore-faced, but they did it. And they did it for years, but even so, I bet dollars to doughnuts that today they wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a lineup.

“My mom and dad didn’t say anything. My mom got some cold cream for my face—I remember it had this awful smell because she had made it herself, and didn’t put anything it in to make it not reek of an old carpet, or the knoll by the crick where the boys would piss during the day. My dad told me to learn where my feet word so that I’d stop falling flat on my face like some moron. And he said to get that dirt off my face, and pointed and my other cheek. I had a black eye, but only on my . . . you know. He said, ‘Boy, get yourself straight, or I’m shipping you off to somewhere and someone who’ll do it for me. I don’t have the time of day to work out your messes.’

“To this day I have no idea what my father did for a living. All I know is that he could cruise with my uncle, that gun docked up in the cab of their yellow Chevy, to some town that was even more in the boonies, deeper into the bumfuck, than we were. Olympia was like a star on the horizon that we followed in some sad excuse of a pilgrimage. If we made it there, we could wipe the sunburns off our backs and stand up straight, get groceries that were fresh and not from the scratch-and-dent. 

“Kelly said that’s where the only girls who were prettier than herself, Elmira, and Tanya were. By the time I was fifteen I was hitching rides there while my dad fucked off with my uncle. I couldn’t drive because the gun was in the truck, and the truck wasn’t ours, and it smelled like old beer and cigs. But I needed to go. I put some bandage, or something, over my eye, so I looked like every day I had gotten into some new fight, and every day I lost. People are decent to hitchers up there, you know. None of this east coast bullshit that somehow pushed it’s way over here. Here is Nam! This ain’t no fast lane, we’ve got no where to fucking go. Do you know where we’ve gone? Tell me on a map. Show me. Explain how a circle is actually a straight line, how there’s something going on for us in the future, in a new direction, on a different path. I can see how deep we’ve gone, I can remember the flush of the forest. I’ve seen the same bloated water buffalo corpse as we’ve gone around. I’ve watched it stink and expand then burst and fill with caverns of flies. We’re going straight down into hell, at this rate.

“But anyway, I make it to Olympia proper. It’s a city, it’s big, there are buildings and parks and too many cars on the road. Girls are wearing dresses and skirts and shorts that barely covered their dainties. I loved it. Sometimes I slept over in this bar, the Longbranch, because the owner had hands where his feet ought to have been. Just like your boy, you know. Sometimes I met girls, but I couldn’t drink and I couldn’t buy them jackshit, but I could sell a story or two to at least get a sympathy kiss. Those, when I got them, were amazing, sad little things. That bandage, my eye, pushed them off. No girl wants to put her soft glossy mouth near something that either might be bleeding, or might be unnatural. 

“Once I showed a girl, a sweet red-haired thing, because she asked if it was an eye-patch or something. Her question didn’t make sense, but I was so love drunk that night, one of the summer ones where it was actually warm and dry instead of just the dank cold we had for most of the year. I peeled that sucker up and threw it in the trash. She just stared at me, then left. She called the owner and said that I ought to be arrested. She started crying. She said I had leprosy, that I had tried to touch her when she didn’t want it. When he refused to call she jumped over the bar and grabbed the phone herself. I ran as far back home as I could, then slept in a ditch for part of the night. 

“When I finally pulled myself in through our kitchen window, Elmira was up waiting for me. She said she had a feeling that I had gotten my sorry ass into trouble, so she better wait up. She gave me a hug and offered some tea, and stared at the spot between my eyebrows. She said she loved me, and then she said goodnight.

“When you’re off bitching and moaning in your foxhole about your boy, because I know you do—you’re not as much of a hard-ass as you think you are, Summers—I think about that girl. I think about Elmira. Every single time. You lucked out, honestly. Sometimes I can’t fucking believe why you ended up here, in this shit-field of a jungle, because what you had was so good. You had someone who would have taken a bullet for you, and for some fucked up reason that you won’t tell me, you ran away. You threw that rock at your own god damned head fifty thousand fucking times. If you die on me before you get back stateside and beg forgiveness, I’m going to sock you so hard you’ll be put on permanent medical leave.

“I saw Tanya and Elmira before I shipped out a few months back. They told me my uncle had shot a girl who had fur all over her body, because the thought she was a cougar mauling a kid. She was picking up her younger brother to give him a ride on her shoulders. They said it was a clean kill, so I suppose I should make my thanks.”


	9. #9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes period-typical racist language toward Vietnamese people, anti-gay dialogue, and thoughts of suicide.

1965\. Westchester, New York.

True to his nature, Alex admitted nothing to himself about his turmoil, about his dreams. He ran each day to try and sweat off the weight of his shoulders, but with the March sun he went and went and went. The heat in the air thrummed his blood. Efficiency in movement, the recycling of cosmic energy. 

He thought about his brother, and how small he would be. He thought about jumping off the bridge on the overpass that they had to drive over each time they went from the mansion into town. 

You can’t run from your problems, he said to himself. He imagined it was in Charles’s old voice, from before he was shot. While he ran he thought about what would have happened if Moira hadn’t cared so much about Charles and hadn’t felt the need to protect him. What if she had only passively loved Charles? Or kept a safe distance, keeping her own violence to herself? All dangerous people ought to be aware of their own ability to kill things, he thought. Moira knew she was strong and capable, but not that she was dangerous. She must have thought that in a fight of mutation against mutation, a gun wouldn’t matter much.

There were no guns in the mansion anymore. The spaces of the relics of Charles’s family were now vacant and undusted.

Hank would not speak to him. Even after being AWOL in ’62 Hank had forgiven him somewhat, but now, after their last spat everything was dead. Radio silence. No control signal going out. Flying blind, if there ever was such a thing. Sean looked at him from behind stacks of records, old biology books, and throw pillows in one of the many upstairs sitting room. Charles couldn’t make it up there anymore, and so the space became a vacuum that Sean tried to fill with whatever noise he could. Once Alex had seen Hank try to get the stench of weed and clove cigarettes out of the heirloom draperies, but they were soiled. 

Alex didn’t go upstairs much, and the hangar was a dead zone. The main floor of the mansion was so vast that he felt like he was back in the super max, that the pressure of all the walls would soon condense in a rapid collapse, and he, the heat and the motion at the core, would supernova. Space did not equate to freedom. 

In a fit of decency, all four of them gathered for lunch in the solarium after the first month of silence. Charles had the paper spread across his legs, the headline, “FIRST AMERICAN TROOPS DISEMBARK TO VIET NAM” readable from any place at the table.

Hank chuffed in his over-sized seat. “You’d think that after all these years the U.S. government would realize that gunpowder doesn’t solve a fundamentally social paradigm. You can’t just kill all the Communists, even if they were attacking the South Vietnamese.”

Charles shook his head, sadly.

“Sounds illegal to me,” Alex said. “Reforming a single nation even though half the country doesn’t want to? I’ll be damned if that’s ‘socially’ okay.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked out at the grounds. The lawns needed mowing, badly, and many of the fruit trees had dropped pounds worth of crop that festered on the ground.

“Please can we not, for like, once—”

“I’m sorry, Sean, but Alex is being difficult on purpose, _again_. Tonkin is what started all this, some egregious error that’s now just tossed the South Vietnamese—”

“So, then we’ll go over and fucking _fix it_.”

Hank bared his teeth and tore at the table top with his claws. “You know what’s next, after Communists? Mutants. It just takes one politician, one man with a beef, to say that mutants are invading the country. That they’re illegal immigrants, seed babies for mutant extremism. They know about Cuba, Alex. If we let troops go in and try and root out the Communists instead of just helping the South Vietnamese, it’s over.”

The air in the solarium was hot and fetid. Charles’s hands were crossed over his lap, covering the newspaper. Sean stared out the window into the lawns and fields. Alex could feel his hands heat up and burn the ridges of his fingerprints into smudgy ashes. He pushed back from the table and left a pile of soot in the shape of his outstretched hands.

“How many times are you gonna stand up and just leave, Alex?” Hank’s eyes were narrowed like fine lines of straw, and sharp. “What’s _wrong_ with you?”

“Nothing,” Alex said. “Nothing, just fag stuff. Better go shoot it all out before the Commies convert me, right?”

“You know, Alex, I actually thought you were a good mutant, even a good person. At least for a while.” Hank adjusted his plate, moving around his utensils and his cup of tea, his mug of coffee. Suddenly he was all decorum, the politest gentleman as he sat without speaking, his hands lax and delicate on the china. The table was deeply scratched, and Sean would not look anyone in the face.

“Typical,” Alex said. “Okay, fine. I’ll be seeing you.”

\

1973\. Viet Nam.

A woman from the Kingdom of Laos came upon them in the night. Her skin was reptilian and glistened faintly through the swatch of fog over the marsh where the squadron slept. Toad saw here from his foxhole and started spitting and pig calling to wake up the others.

“Jesus and Joseph, get up!” Toad shoved mud and grass up from around his foxhole, and the steady thud of it falling down like mortar rain made Alex and the newbies come up.

There were two new mutants in the squadron, neither of whom were sharpshooters or particularly dedicated grunts. One was a trombone player from a big band up in Detroit who, when completely still, melded into his backdrop like water over paint; the other was a teacher’s assistant at a school for children with developmental disabilities whose bones were not calcified and never broke. Both of them were unremarkable.

Both of them started as the woman and Toad faced off. They were children in the night and mist, still boys, and much younger than Alex. Alex, who now had aged something like a decade, was still angry and still small and still ready to run. They cowered and switched off their safeties.

“I’m anti-Communist,” said the woman. “Put down your guns.” She sounded disappointed.

“I’ve seen enough gooks to know when to shoot,” Toad spat. “Come hell or high water, you know? Damn jungle rats try to come into my camp? Hell.”

Alex, groggy from sleeping under mud and the long nights devoid of the sight of the moon, crawled up from his pit. 

“Fuck off, Toad,” he said. 

“Summers? You in charge? Get your men in order!” The woman took off her headscarf and pulled her hair back. “This is what the Americans get for not keeping with good intelligence.”

“What’s this bat talking about,” Toad said, “in the middle of the night? Shit, we’re in the dead center of the mountains.”

“Jesus,” Alex said, “Cullus was our intel guy.” He tapped himself on the head with his blistered fists. “Onaona?”

“Yes, good, you have yourself together, finally. Turn off that light!”

Jameson, the trombonist, shoved his flashlight down his uniform and spat out a whispered apology. 

“Last set of orders said the South Koreans were coming through with the drop,” Alex said.

Onaona snapped her teeth. They were thick and yellow and curved like a bear’s. “How far are you behind? All the South Koreans left in March. Do you know where you are?” 

The huddle moved to a small gulch where they camped under tarpaulins and kept their rifles cocked. Over the ridge was a field of corpses that Alex and Toad had assaulted; it was a small hamlet of villagers who had nothing more than a small wooden temple, a herd of water buffalo, and a clutch of five or six children. Toad spotted them, took pot shots, and Alex fell into following him. After the smoke cleared only a few bodies were left, but they were brutalized, so covered in mud, slime, and blood that they did not look like people, but like dark shapes or the edges of shadows caught between tree trunks. 

Jameson was on watch.

“It’s mid-August,” Onaona whispered. “You’ve missed your rendezvous by three weeks. Presumed dead, no one was going to go looking. I stayed behind, lucky for you, because I’d rather not see more mutants be burned out.”

Alex thought, I’m lucky to have you. He was, truly, because all his other allies had left him. Cullus was gone, and Hank—Alex’s fingerprints were still ashes on the tabletop, if the table was still there. 

It would not have been good if during that first deep-jungle mission Onaona had not been their meet-up in the mountains. She knew nothing about Alex, and even less about Cullus, save for why he was gone. Because she was a woman she reminded Alex of Raven, but Onaona was nothing like her, and that soothed him. 

Her brown eyes flashed in the dark like warning flares as she bent her head low into their huddle. “Listen, they’re going to bomb Cambodia. Big guns, not just the little air support that you can call in on your radio. Heavy bombing aircraft. You were all supposed to be gone months ago.” The skin around her mouth was yellow with dried skin and scales, and as she spoke Onaona licked at it with her thick tongue. “We’re north, here,” she said, and pointed to Alex’s damaged map. “Vinh. You need to get out.”

“We never got orders to go back,” Toad said. Jameson scuffed his boot against a mossy stone. “Last hamlet said we should keep going until Hanoi, that this was some Christ almighty deep cover.”

Onaona looked at all of them, then placed her hands into the pockets of her jacket. She pulled out a lighter and a full pack of non-filtered cigarettes.

“Take them, Summers. You’ll need them more than me. Barter, or something, I can’t take you on my lead.”

He said nothing, mostly because the jungle was now very loud inside his head, but nodded his thanks and took the pack and the lighter. Toad didn’t say anything, only sat on his pack and rubbed at his face. The rest of the squad were tall and silent in the dark, and for a moment Alex forgot their names, their faces, their mutations. All of them were strangers in this mountain crag where only a brave Laotian woman could find them.

Alex coughed and wiped cleaning grease onto his face. He felt sluggish and vaporous, as if he too could crawl away as mist through the dens and foxholes and the deep stink of the place, past the bodies and the bomb fields, and then evaporate into the sun, maybe pass some birds on his way up, then say Fuck you one last time. 

Onaona said: “I don’t know how your military works in this way, but by this point I would hope that they’ve sent home condolence letters, or something, to your families. At least they have closure.”

There was no closure for many soldiers in the field. Their bodies, missing in action or killed, were sometimes so damaged that many could have been mutants and no one would have known otherwise. Alex thought: there are over fifty thousand of us here in the shit fields, in the deep jungle, in the brown water. He saw a man burned by both chemical spray and by his own core plasma. He saw the soldiers in green and brown and civilian clothes as they fell down, mulched by anti-personnel claymores and traps laced into the very trees. He saw these things and thought, there is no closure here. This book will never close; I’m fucked for life. I’ve seen prison and I’ve seen crashes and I’ve seen people leave, but this will always stay. You can’t burn down the jungle, you can’t shoot all the Communists. He thought, I don’t know how old I am, and I have no more letters to write. I’m not sure I know how.

In his pocket Alex kept Cullus’s old patch that he had talked about hundreds of times during their patrols. Cullus had kept it, saying, “Childhood nostalgia, you know,” and reminisced about his sisters. Alex touched it with his gummed fingers and felt poor and dirty. He felt honest, and like himself. He would die here, and Hank would not know. Charles would, be he doubted he would tell.

“Right,” he said. “Right, okay. Line up, boys, we’re going south. I figure if we show up in the DMZ or something and have our tags, there’s bound to be some airlift. Tokyo, probably. We can scrap from there.” He turned back to his foxhole and dug up his pack. He pulled out four bags of candies and his spare tag. He shoved it into his boot, like he was supposed to do when he first enlisted, then started to collapse the hole. All of his men did the same.

Onaona turned to leave. She was a shadow when her back was turned, and vicious when it wasn’t. The green of her skin kept her flush with the jungle, as if she had never been there. “You’re a good soldier,” she said to Alex. 

“Probably not much more,” he agreed.


End file.
